Chapter 1

They wouldn’t let him up off of that goddamn gurney. He struggled and screamed as they wheeled him down a long hall, screamed so loud that his throat hurt. He threatened the orderlies and the nurses and the doctors and his father and everyone within hearing distance if they didn’t let him go. He was still screaming when a man in a white coat came over to him with a syringe in plain view.

“Mr. Leonhart, are you going to calm down yourself, or am I going to have to make you calm down?”

“Fuck you, calm down! Calm this!”

“Okay,” the doctor said and slid the needle into Squall’s arm.

“Ow, fuck! Get the fuck away from me you quack bastard! Goddamn it!”

The doctor nodded to the orderlies and they rolled Squall on his gurney into a small room that was padded with fabric.

“Scream yourself out in here, Kid, no one can hear you,” said one of the men before closing the door behind him.

Squall fought to get control of his breath and he sucked in a big gulp of air before giving voice to a throat-scraping, screaming, “FUCK!”

He looked around him at the white padded walls and the single fluorescent light in the ceiling. He tried again to pull free from his restraints but it was useless; they were tied too tight. He lay there, so angry that he couldn’t stop crying, until a little while had passed and he was seeing double. Whatever that stuff was that the doctor had shot into him made him feel like he was packed in cotton. He tried to get up a good scream, but all that came out was a hoarse moan.

The door opened and someone took hold of the gurney and pulled it out of the room, but Squall was too fuzzy-headed to turn and look. Down a white hall and into another white room, and then someone opened his restraints.

“Come on, sit up,” someone said, and hands gripped him and pulled him into a sitting position. Squall looked around and saw more orderlies standing by, and a nurse in white. Was everything in this place white? His blue jeans and green t-shirt were the only things of any color.

The nurse opened a closet full of sheets and blankets and other white things and began taking things out and piling them beside Squall on the gurney. Pajama pants and a shirt, a pillow and a blanket. Squall stared at them, blinking and trying to find the energy to get up and run for it.

“There you are,” the nurse said, nodding and reaching for a clipboard. “This is what we call the intake process, where you are admitted. Your bag is already in your room, and it has been searched for what we call sharps. Anything that you could cut yourself with has been removed. Anything like shampoo or lotion with alcohol in it has been removed. We have placed these items in a box in the sharps closet for you, and you may sign certain of these items out during the sharps period from six to six-thirty in the morning and in the evening. You will get everything back at outtake before you leave us. Any and all drugs that were found will be noted. Illegal drugs will be disposed of, any prescription medicine will be put away and returned to you at outtake. Any questions?”

Squall stared at her, still trying to focus enough to feel his legs.

“All right, now your person will be searched for sharps, your clothes will be stored for you and you will change into the hospital issue pants and shirt you’ve got right here.” She patted the pile beside Squall.

Two male orderlies came forward and pulled Squall to his feet.

“Please get undressed, Mr. Leonhart,” the nurse said, walking away. Squall turned to watch her. She went to a desk and computer at the back of the room and sat facing away from him. She began to type at the computer, referring often to her clipboard.

Squall thought about his situation. The two orderlies looked big and had thick arms and barrel chests. Those restraints had been painful, and he was not eager to have them back on. He was pretty sure that if he did not change clothes of his own volition, these men would do it for him. He swallowed his pride and took off his shirt.

One of the orderlies stepped forward and told him to lift his arms and turn around. Satisfied that Squall was not smuggling drugs in his arm pits, the man nodded and told him to continue.

Squall took off his pants and stopped, but one of the men gestured and said, “Boxers too, Kid.”

“No way.”

The two burly orderlies crossed their arms and answered with silence.

“Hell, no,” Squall said, crossing his own, slimmer arms over his pale chest and shaking his head. The movement set his brain spinning and he wondered again what he had been given.

One of the men shrugged and came forward to pull down Squall’s underwear. Squall stepped back and banged into the gurney, then tripped on the fabric around his ankles. The other orderly turned Squall around and roughly bent him over.

“Shit,” Squall said.

“Uh-huh,” said the taller of the two men, a black man with a shaved head and a deep, rumbling voice. He reached down and tugged the boxers off of Squall and lifted them. Squall stood and turned around, flushed to the roots, and watched as the man shook out the boxers. A small sheet of foil-wrapped caplets fell out and Squall scowled.

“What’re these?” the other man, a Centradi by the looks of him, asked. He took the sheet and popped out one pill. “Rohypnol?”

“Yep,” said the black man, taking them back and dumping them into a box on the counter behind them. “You got anything else stashed up where we would need to look with a flashlight, Kid?”

Squall trembled with his anger. “Those are mine, goddamn it. I need those.”

“They ain’t yours any more,” said the Centradi orderly, putting a lid on the box.

“Okay, Kid,” said the other man. “Get dressed.” He took Squall’s clothes but gave him back the underwear.

White, of course, the long cotton pants and t-shirt were both white, though the pants had a worn pattern of light blue polka dots. Squall got dressed, still shaking with anger.

“Okay,” said the nurse, coming over with a sheet of paper. She handed it to Squall. “I want you to check the information over and then sign the bottom.”

His name, place of residence, age, all the basic information that defined who he was written out in smelly ink on perforated computer paper. On the bottom it had a list of statements: “I will not do myself harm,” “I will inform a counselor if I feel the urge to do myself harm,” “I will give twenty-four hour notice prior to checking myself out against medical advice.” Squall muttered them to himself as he went down the list.

“That last doesn’t apply to you, since you are only seventeen and your father signed you in,” she said.

“Had me committed, you mean,” Squall said. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it over his shoulder. “I’m not signing anything.”

“Not signing that paper cuts down on the privileges you receive, Mr. Leonhart, while staying here at Esthar State Mental Health Home.”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

The nurse didn’t blink at his expletive, she simply bent and retrieved the paper, then put it in her pocket.

“Follow me, Mr. Leonhart,” she said, and nodded at the two orderlies before scooping up the pile of blankets and walking out of the room. The men crowded Squall on either side and led him out that way. Squall looked around, searching for a possible escape route.

“It’s not gonna happen, Kid,” said the one orderly, taking Squall’s elbow in a big, meaty hand.

“Fuck you,” Squall hissed, still shaking. He ignored it, wishing he had his drugs. They helped to stop the shaking.

They passed a metal-caged room with people in white jackets inside. Nurses and orderlies, and a doctor, Squall thought. The hall opened up into a large room with chairs and couches and tables.

“This is the common room,” said the nurse, pointing to it as they walked by. “This is where you’ll spend most of your time when you’re not in sessions or at meals.”

“Fabulous,” Squall muttered. The room was tiled in green, speckled Formica. The chairs were upholstered in split vinyl that leaked stuffing, and the couches all sagged in the middle. The tables were covered in puzzles halfway through being solved, games of checkers and chess in the midst of play, and pencils and paper scribbled with pictures and words. Probably they all say “make the voices stop,” Squall thought.

“Here is your room where you’ll be living while you’re staying here at the Home. Everyone is at lunch right now, you’ll be able to meet your roommate when they get back.”

Squall looked around the room. There were two beds against two opposing walls, one of which was heaped with blankets, the other stripped of bedding. The nurse put Squall’s pile of sheets, blanket and pillow on this bed.

The walls were painted a dull yellow, the floors were tiled in that same green Formica that covered the common room and lined the hall of doors all leading to bedrooms. Squall, in socks—they had taken his sneakers from him, too—walked around the empty half of his room, opening the drawers in a dresser and night table provided for him, tapping his fingers on the wall. Cinder blocks, he noted, and rolled his eyes. There was one big closet, which Squall opened to find shelves with more pajama pants and shirts, and hangers with white cotton robes.

Who’s the crack-up I get to live with? Squall wondered, and looked over at the other side of the room.

There were a few pictures on the dresser, one of a kid and his parents standing in front of the Tomb of the Unknown King. There was a poster with torn corners of a gold chocobo over the night table, with Chocoboy waving in the background. There was a double-stacked row of books along the wall on the back of the dresser, big leather-bound novels and small, trashy paperbacks. Whoever his roommate was, at least the guy could read.

Another door led to a small bathroom with a shower with no curtain and a toilet and sink. There was a mirror over the sink, and along the top rim of it were chess figures, only the white ones. When Squall looked carefully, he saw that the queen was first in line, followed by a knight, then the other pieces in order along the wall.

He blinked at himself in the mirror, then pulled down one bottom eyelid and leaned forward to look. The stuff that doctor had shot into him had worn off, probably from all the adrenaline. He straightened and picked up the knight sitting beside the queen on the top rim of the mirror. There was no king, he realized, looking at all the chess pieces. Hyne above, what kind of crazy had they put him in here with? He flipped the knight into the sink.

“You’re on the extra security ward, Mr. Leonhart,” said the nurse, and Squall came back into the room. “You were deemed an escape threat. If you can prove that you don’t belong here during the course of your stay, then you may be moved to the minimum ward where you would receive more privileges, but that all remains to be seen. While you are here you will be submitted to fifteen minute checks, which means that every fifteen minutes a nurse will track you down and have to lay eyes on you, whether you are in session, in the common room or in your own room. After two weeks you may be bumped up to thirty minute checks, but your roommate is on ten minute checks, so it won’t make much difference.

“You’ll want to make yourself familiar with our rules. There is no fighting, no carrying on, no vandalism. There will be no unescorted trips from the ward and no going outside unescorted. You will obey our sharps rule and will receive nothing that is deemed a sharp outside of the scheduled time period each day, when you will be allowed to sign out a sharps item and you will have an allotted time to sign it back in before Mick and Jim or one of the other orderlies come looking for it.” The nurse pointed to the black and the Centradi orderlies in respect to their names.

“Meal times are seven to eight in the morning, noon to one in the afternoon and six to seven in the evening. You will eat in the cafeteria in a special section where the other maximum ward patients eat. If you are being penalized for bad behavior you will have your meal brought to you and you will eat in your room.

“Our process for discipline is simple. Break a rule, lose a privilege. First you lose cafeteria visits, then you are bumped up to ten minute checks, then you lose common room privileges at which point you stay in your room unless you are in session with a counselor and do not leave for any other purpose.”

“That would be a tragedy,” Squall said, flopping down to sit on the bare bed. “Banished from the head cases.”

The nurse ignored him. “There is a complete list of rules on the wall in the common room. Our final move would be to place you on the Full Security Ward where patients never leave their rooms and are pretty much restricted to bed care. And Mr. Leonhart,” she said, looking Squall in the eye, “if you think you’ve seen some head cases on this ward, you ain’t seen nothing. Full Security is where the really bad ones go, young man, and you would not like it there.”

Squall snorted.

“Well,” the nurse went on. “You have a meeting with your intake counselor, now. There are slippers in the closet for you.”

Squall was just going to have to find a way out of this place—either legally or otherwise—later; they just weren’t going to let him be. He got the slippers and followed the nurse out of the room. This time the two orderlies, Mick and Jim, followed rather than trying to frog march Squall out of there.

As they walked down the hall and past the common room, Squall looked around for windows. He thought they were on the first floor, but even if they weren’t, he could get around that.

Mick the orderly must have noticed his searching, because he moved up alongside Squall and took his elbow. “I can see it in your eyes, Kid, you think you’re gonna get out of here on your own. Give it up, ‘cuz I haven’t lost one yet. You ain’t going nowhere.”

Fuck.

Squall sat on a plaid couch facing a tiny man with a few wisps of graying hair and big, thick horn-rim glasses. His suit was cheap, and so was his cologne. The counselor stuttered and tapped his pen against a clipboard while Squall gave him his patented “Cold Eye”—the iciest gaze he could muster. There wasn’t a man alive that could meet that glacial stare.

“So, uh, Mr. Leonhart, we have a full history for you here. The Pre-President, uh, that is your father, uh, g-gave us your files, and his, that is your doctor sent over all, uh, perti-pertinent information. The, uh, the, uh, President’s doctor who resides at the P-Pal-Palace was your doctor, as well?”

Squall had been living with his father at the President’s Palace in Esthar since the end of the Sorceress War that summer, six months, and now it was winter. Laguna Loire’s personal care giver, Dr. Carr, had been his doctor, too, and had kept tabs on the progression of Squall’s condition, but Squall told none of that to his intake counselor. The man had the files, anyway, didn’t he? Squall said nothing. Instead, he stared, so cold that the guy was shivering.

“W-well, yes. Yes. I see it all here. So you’ve been having these at-attacks since the end of the war, then, have you?”

Again, the man had the files. Squall kept his mouth shut.

“Well, ye-yes, you have, I see it here,” the counselor said, tapping the clipboard again. He riffled through the papers there, then picked up a thick manila folder filled with papers. Squall could see the words “Loire, Squall,” printed on the side and he decided to speak.

“My name’s not Loire.”

“Huh?” The counselor looked up for a moment, then flipped through the papers on his clipboard again. “But you are President Loire’s suh-, uh, son?”

“He’s my father,” Squall said and, tired of the guy’s stuttering, turned off the ice.

“If he’s, um, your, your, uh, father, then why—?”

Squall sighed. “Look, my name’s Leonhart, okay? Not Loire. Lee-on-haaaart. Got it?”

“Well, um, yes, sure, uh—”

Squall leaned back on the couch and stuck his legs out straight in front of him. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared out the window. The sky was so blue.

“All right, then, uh, what we’re going to do, is um, observe your…condition. And decide what, if any, meds you may, um, need to be put on. And, uh, what kind of therapy you require. Until then you will just, uh, attend regular meetings with, uh, other, well, uh, patients, where other counselors will…observe you. Too.” He nodded and glanced down at his clipboard, then nodded again. “But in the meantime the doctor on-call has prescribed you a standard sedative to, uh, well, calm you.”

Squall had been self-medicating for months, now, but he had never really been on a doctor-prescribed medical regiment. He rolled the idea around, seeing how it tasted. He wasn’t so sure he liked it.

“Um, you’re going to be sent, that is, I’m sending you back to your room now, where you will be given a snack since you missed lunch. And then, uh, you’ll uh, go to a two o’clock meeting, and, uh, we’ll go from the-, uh, there.”

The counselor pressed a button on his desk and then the door opened to admit Jim, the orderly. Squall growled, but Jim seemed unimpressed.

“Come on, let’s go,” Jim said, but Squall did not budge. “Come on.” Squall still would not move and Jim scowled. “You have three seconds to get up on your own. Three, two—one.” Jim gripped Squall’s elbow and dragged him up, but Squall let his legs relax and he slumped to the floor.

“Oh, oh no, Squall, please,” the counselor said coming over, and Squall turned the Cold Eye back on him. The little man backed up until his legs hit his chair and he sat down.

“That’s it, call Mick and tell him to get the gurney,” Jim said to the cowering counselor, who reached for the phone on his desk and, shivering, dialed.

Jim tried to haul Squall up again, but Squall stayed lax. Jim tried once more, then let go of Squall’s elbow so that the boy fell to the floor. His head bounced once off of the sea-green carpeting. Squall opened his mouth to say something offensive, but then his head bounced off of the floor again, a second time, and then again a third.

Oh, shit.

“Oh, shit,” Jim the orderly said and got down on his knees quickly. Squall was shaking all over, his head was bouncing up and down, and then his arms started to flop, and then his legs. “Quick, get something in his mouth so he doesn’t bite his tongue.”

Squall’s head hurt from the floor, but otherwise he was numb to his body. He could see the counselor from a distance, but the room was receding from him. As his body convulsed, his mind skipped away, and Squall heard himself screaming, “Through to the other side, get through! Go, Rinoa! The world is breaking, get through! It’s all falling apart, Rinoa, where are you?!”

Time was bending around him, compressed time, and Squall had lost sight of everyone. The sane world broke into pieces that flew into his eyes like snowflakes and he batted them away.

His head hurt a lot.

Squall’s world came back into focus. A fluorescent light shone over him, he could feel a soft blanket tucked around him, and his head hurt. Things were fuzzy, and he didn’t know where he was, but the pain in his head was very real.

“My head hurts,” he said, and almost didn’t recognize that scratchy voice as his own.

“So, you’re awake.”

Squall looked over to the left, beside his bed, and saw that nurse again. He turned his head, slowly, to the right and saw that insipid poster of the chocobo. Okay, then, he was in his room, and he was at the hospital. The Mental Hospital, oh yeah. Oh. Damn.

“Can I have a—” he said to the nurse, but his voice gave out before he could finish.

“Sh, don’t talk,” said the nurse. She reached over to his bed side table and picked up a glass of water, which was what he wanted. He tried to take it and found himself tied down. “We had to restrain you, you were shaking so hard,” she said, tipping the glass against his lips so he could drink. “We didn’t want you to hurt yourself. There, now try that again.”

Squall cleared his throat and managed, “I had a fit?” His throat hurt, but the water helped.

“Yes, a bad one,” the nurse said. She put her hand on his for a moment before working on the buckle of the leather restraint. Once it came free she got up and went to remove the ones around his ankles. “How does your head feel?”

“Like it was hit by a truck,” he rasped, shaking out the kinks in his left wrist. He noticed a band-aid on his arm. “What, did you people shoot me again?”

“Huh?” the nurse said, looking up. She undid the last restraint and took up his left arm. She tapped on the band-aid and nodded. “We had to give you something to calm you. The doctor gave you a medicine designed for epileptics. He has prescribed you a similar drug which you will begin taking regularly.”

Squall had something nasty to say to that, but his throat was just too sore. He sat up slowly, holding his head. “I have to pee,” he said, and lurched to his feet. He might have fallen if the nurse hadn’t helped him to the bathroom. He stopped her at the threshold, though. “I’ll manage from here,” he said, and closed the door. There was no lock on it, so he kicked it once for extra emphasis.

Squall took care of business, then he staggered over to the mirror. There was a big, red mark on his forehead that might bruise. The white of his eyes were veined with blood. He leaned against the wall opposite the mirror and closed his eyes. The back of his head was throbbing. He wished he had been allowed to bring in a curaga, or even just a lousy stinking cure.

He opened his eyes and glared at his reflection. He noticed the knight was back in its place on the top of the mirror.

“Give me something for this headache,” Squall demanded as he threw open the door to the bathroom and came back into his room. The nurse was talking to someone, and they both looked up at him as he entered.

“Oh, good, Mr. Leonhart, you get to meet your roommate—”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Leonhart??”

Squall made his eyes focus on the other patient, his roommate, and then his jaw dropped halfway to the floor.

“Seifer? Seifer is my roommate?”

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